Live from #EE13: Overview of Eloqua Experience

It’s Day 1 of the main sessions at Eloqua Experience. About 2000 marketers are here and ready to learn new insights to help improve their demand generation, marketing automation, lead scoring efforts and more. Over the course of the next two days, I will be updating this blog post with tidbits, nuggets of information and other key lessons from the event if you weren’t able to make it out to San Francisco or if you are just looking for a recap of what you may have missed.

I sat in ona session with SiriusDecisions’Megan Heuer on the rise of account-based marketing and how it is helping bridge the gap between marketing and sales. In addition to being a cupcake master, Megan (@megheuer) calls herself the Marketing Therapist. She explained how marketing is no longer in the honeymoon phase and often times, we are the victims of our own success. Marketers are generating more leads and sales now is saying that they don’t want more leads. Instead, they want help with the leads they already have. Megan explained that in many companies marketing isn’t sourcing as much pipeline as usual. She brought up the beloved demand waterfall to help illustrate how to identify possible reasons for slip. Are response rates too low? Is sales not following up on its SLAs? Are leads staying in stage 0, left to die? Megan offered a six-step program to help mend this relationship through account-based marketing:

Identify: Understand which account-based marketing will work for you. For example: large accounts (1:1), named accounts (1:few), industry/segment (1:few), customer lifecycle (1:many).Inform: Commit to plan your tactics with account information in mind. Ensure that what you are trying to accomplish is always attached to a goal and to the accounts that your sales team care about. Understand the account industry, buying centers, wallet share, sales goals, stage of active deals and contacts known/needed. You’ll be in an even better place if you understand the key needs of the buying center, relationship status, relationship map, growth trends, competitive environment, contact engagement history, account-level attributes and buying signals.Align: Determine the right expectations. In large or strategic accounts (1-3 per rep), sales should be sourcing 90% or more deals. In this case, think about how marketing can help influence these deals. In named accounts (10-30 per rep), there is a greater opportunity for marketing to source deals. Usually 75-85% of deals are sourced by sales. In territory accounts (50 per rep), 70% of sales are typically sourced by sales. Also, be sure to align on goals: are we focusing on new opportunities or better relationships?Plan: In every plan, don’t just focus on the tactics. Instead, focus on the collection of activities aligned to the account goal. Tip: don’t just focus on the buying journey. You will be missing the boat if you are only focused on generating new leads. You must engage and enthuse your customers so you stay relevant and valuable.Execute: Do a content inventory and map existing content assets to your account goals. Utilize different technologies to help optimize your web content, tap into social communities, develop influence models.Evaluate: Some accounts take years to close, so look for early insights to show early progress. Over time, track revenue growth and retention to determine your long term value.

Updated 11:45 AM PT

Next I joined a session on alignment with Scott Sheppard and Brian Teevan of ADP, marketing operations and sales enablement/demand generation, respectively. In their session, Sweet Dreams After a Lead Management Nightmare, Scott and Brian shared how ADP entirely reworked its lead management system. The two speakers collectively have 13 years of experience using Eloqua. ADP was in need of a change when it hit a cross road – its infrastructure was ad hoc across multiple business units and there was a goal of centralizing everything to one CRM and one Marketing Automation system. There was no qualification when leads were sent to sales. There was no alignment around the definition of a lead, no training and no SLAs in place. Generally, ADP suffered from limited insight and feedback from sales. What did all of this mean? 30% of leads never made it to sales, costing ADP millions of lost revenue. Scott and Brian offered the following insight on how ADP beat this challenge:

Plug the leaks: Let’s focus on tactical advice. ADP focused on mapping, triaging, fixing and repeating that process. It developed various error alerts to help minimize all failure points. As a result, ADP gained more credibility with the sales team and built stronger relationships with other teams.One View of the Truth: ADP needed to provide the organization with data to be able to make strategic decisions. It implemented one common measure to view, around the globe, throughout all business units and all 9,000 sales reps. Scott focused on standardizing information around a lead (detailed source info, routing data, progression & outcome, classification info). For example, ADP set standard funnel stages around the globe so there was zero room for negotiation on what makes an MQL and MQL, etc. This gave ADP the opportunity to measure all outcomes.Eat the elephant one bite at a time: Ensure alignment at the top level. Focus on clearly defining processes to ensure that sales is only getting the leads that are most valuable to them. ADP started with a pilot to test, then rolled out the process area by area.Smooth over change management: Instill a sense of urgency across the team/organization to get people excited about the change. Over communicate what your goals are and how you are planning on executing upon them. Show and demonstrate early successes to build credibility early and get people hooked.ADP’s Results: Data-driven investment decisions, one global system, scalable support and the creation of a foundation for fast development. Leads are called and followed up with within two minutes. Pre-qualification of leads saves sales time working bad leads. It boosted value per lead by 110% in a year’s time. Nurtured contacts were 15% more likely to enter a sales process with ADP.The demand gen perspective: ADP uses the SiriusDecisions Demand Waterfall to optimize its lead management process. This helps it align on one view of the truth.

Updated Thursday, 7:47 AM PT

We are coming back from a night at the Markies (here is a list of the winners – Congrats to our customers, Kronos and Dell!) and some entertainment with Robin Thicke. If you missed our session with Mindjet and Juniper Networks on predictive analytics, here is a full overview of the session.

Updated Thursday, 10:20 AM PT

This morning I sat in on Amandah Magnarelli’s session on data cleansing and lead creation. She is the director of database marketing at Forrester. Amandah shared some insights on how Forrester leveraged Eloqua to enrich company and contact information, cut down on clutter in CRM and pre-qualify leads for sales. The final results of the data washing machine process were a reduction of 35% of unqualified marketing leads.

Forrester was collecting information as visitors came to its site. As they filled out webforms, the information was transfered to the CRM based on an exact email match process. If that wasn’t possible, the second level match was based on the account name and the third level match was made using DnB. It recognized this process wasn’t working and wanted to answer the following questions: How do we get firmographic data in Eloqua? How do we qualify up front in Eloqua? How will we keep the data up to date? Forrester wanted to tackle all these problems within one system. So what did they do? The removed the on-premise file transfer process and evaluated every system and process it had in place. Here are some specific takeaways from Forrester’s process:

Process flow for company data: Here’s Forrester’s new proccess – standardize company values with Iso2 codes, standardize state/province codes for US and Canada, run DnB cleanse, match and append data, append Forrester industry classification based on SIC, calculate revenue based on employee count, update SFDC, update contacts associated to companyStandardize and cleanse account and contact addresses: Be careful and conduct different checks to ensure that contact addresses are correct, regardless of headquarter addresses stored on the account. For example, an employee is an ex-Pat in the UK.Process flow for contacts: This follows the same process as company in addition to mapping to exisitng company based on DUNS, creating the account in SFDC if the company doesn’t exist, and creating the lead if it is a good fit for ForresterAuto-triggers: The team doesn’t have to take account. Every 30 days company records are getting updated and triggers are sent when necessary. The process reduced time from 96 hours per company to virtually 0.Results: Forrester went from a 64% match rate on data to 86% match rate, reduced unqualified marketing leads by 30% and eliminated 96 hours of resources touching the data

Updated Thursday, 3:20 PM PT

The last session of the day was lead by Christine Tseng (@tinetseng) of Twitter and Meagen Eisenberg (@meisenberg) of DocuSign. Christine and Meagan discussed how to utilize Twitter to drive revenue. Twitter is able to connect us with others who share our interests at a very broad scale. It provides an opportunity for all of our businesses to join the conversation and connect with people who care about your business and space. Twitter did a study with Compete.com to determine how Twitter activity can impact business. Christine gave a few examples of how a B2B tech tweet increased the likelihood of an increase to site traffic, form traffic and form completes. Christine and Meagen then offered the following advice to help drive success with Twitter:

Content: Content is of the utmost importance when it comes to sharability and engagement on Twitter. Both Christine and Meagen encouraged the audience to tailor content and tweets to match different phases in the funnel or buyer’s journey. In the awareness phase it is important to impress your followers with exciting content such as inforgraphics, newsworthy statistics. Share case studies, demos and trials to help pull followers through the next stage of evaluation. Experiment with CTAs to attract followers to conduct a demo. The next stage of the funnel that Christine and Meagen focused on was purchase. They recommended sharing content that helps followers uncover ROI potential. Lastly, Twitter can be used to develop advocates for your brand. This type of content could be a fun contest, video or quiz that could help boost engagement. Consider bringing over your digital marketing strategies to better target your followers and audience. This can be done with the use of hashtags and promoted tweets.Consider bringing over your digital marketing strategies to better target your followers and audience. This can be done with the use of hashtags and promoted tweets.Targeting: Twitter has capabilities to target based on three criteria – keywords, usernames and . These options help to ensure relevant content and tweets are displayed when users engage with related tweets either by clicking expand or clicking a link. For username targeting, Meagen recommended targeting your competitors and partners to get in front of prospects. DocuSign generated close to 2K leads in its first quarter and 20 opportunities.Tweet Copy: Just as important as the content you are driving your followers to, is the tweet copy itself. Christine encouraged the audience to test and experiment with different tweets. Consider starting with a question to boost engagement. Avoid hashtags when trying to drive to a specific landing page when you are running a direct marketing campaign. Instead keep the end goal in mind. Test different language around your offer. Use the words free, demo, trial, offer, etc. Try working in your value proposition.